David Lange Quotes
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George W. Bush: a person who is the ultimate outcome of the American condition. Someone promoted above ability because of circumstance and organisation and empathy. You don't have to be intelligent. A moron in a hurry could know that you don't prevent war by having a war.
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'I went in a round of the Domain on Saturday morning in a rally car. At the start of it, I was asked if I felt scared. I said, 'certainly not, I have been working with Roger for years'.'
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I, as prime minister, never went to Washington. Certainly never went to a presidential ranch. I hate to say this, but I wasn't going to be the pilot fish to the shark, whereas Australia quite happily bobbed along like a happy little pilot fish with a shark who was a messy eater, and I just couldn't feel like that.
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Lange was hosting a reception at Vogel House for the Chinese politician Hu Yao Bang when the lights went out. Lange immediately asked all the guests to raise their hands because 'many hands make light work.' The audience complied, and to their amazement the lights immediately came back on. Lange was invited to visit China.
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We are an enemy of the nuclear threat and we are an enemy of testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. New Zealand did not buy into this fight. France put agents into New Zealand. France put spies into New Zealand. France lets off bombs in the Pacific. France puts its President in the Pacific to crow about it.
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I wouldn't call the Prime Minister gutless. That's all that's left of him.
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It's a funny thing when you think you're dead. You're not terrified of it anymore. There's a sort of a epiphany to religious thing; it's not sort of church-based, but you end up with a serenity which you didn't have before, and I just simply enjoy it. It really does sound stupid, but I've got to tell you it's made my life.
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Winston Peters: 'the only member of Parliament named after a concrete block, and I can understand that.' 1
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When asked, 'Does God help you?': 'He's not really in caucus lately.'
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After a very long year we've got a very short knight.
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Greens are not expected to be anything but nice.
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To US Ambassador H. Monroe Browne, who owned a racehorse called Lacka Reason: 'You are the only ambassador in the world to race a horse named after your country's foreign policy.'
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On Roger Douglas: 'He's like rust, he never sleeps.'
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He viewed humour as a relaxing introduction to many situations. 'It is, of course, completely inappropriate in some... but in the end, you know, if you were serious in this job you'd go mad.'
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'Will the United States pull the rug on New Zealand? The answer is no. They might polish the lino a bit harder and hope that I execute a rather unseemly glide across it.'
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He's gone around the country stirring up apathy.
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Our military forces are an arm of government, just like the Department of Social Welfare, although probably less able to inflict widespread harm.
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...it all happened so quickly you got a lot of bewilderment; you get a lot of people who are basically meat-and-three-veg quarter-acre New Zealanders who find themselves eating dim sims with chopsticks and they can't cope.
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When asked, 'So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?': 'I'm going to be a jockey.'
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On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. 'How old is this ruin?' someone asked a guide. 'Forty-two years,' said Lange.
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This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.
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He had more on his mind than his mind could hold.
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We do not wish to have nuclear weapons on New Zealand soil or in our harbors. We do not ask, we do not expect, the United States to come to New Zealand's assistance with nuclear weapons or to present American nuclear capability as a deterrent to an attacker.
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They couldn't, in the National Party, run a bath and if either the deputy leader or the leader tried to, Sir Robert would run away with the plug.